Reliability engineering in the aerospace industry involves simulating a deployment or release of one or more products into the marketplace in order to forecast the reliability and performance of those products. Such forecasts may be utilized to determine costs and financial risks associated with product reliability guarantees, determine appropriate pricing for a product, and/or for inventory and logistics management. For example, many maintenance service agreements require a producer of a product to meet certain reliability commitments for a predetermined amount of time. Poor performance over this period may result in financial penalties being levied against the producer. Reliability engineering enables the producer to identify the risks of a deploying a product up front so that such costs and financial penalties can be avoided.
Currently, many reliability engineering tools simulate a product deployment based on a Monte Carlo simulation methodology that predicts the cumulative reliability for a population of deployed products based on the historical reliability of similar products. Other reliability engineering tools are based on probabilistic methods that use a probability density function to characterize product failures by estimating the cumulative risk of failure for the population of deployed products. Each of these methods predicts the cumulative reliability of a population of deployed products, they may prevent reliability engineers from accurately assessing the risk associated with a product deployment. For example, some product populations may have statistical distributions that allow the cumulative reliability measure to exceed a predetermined reliability target, even though a significant number of products within the population do not meet the reliability target. Thus, in order to accurately assess the risks of a product deployment it is necessary to predict product reliability for each deployed product population.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a method for predicting the reliability of each product for a product deployment. In addition, it is desirable to provide a method for assessing the risk associated with the product deployment. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description of the invention and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background of the invention.